I ordered custom blinds from Home Depot, with delivery promised for Wednesday. They didn’t arrive. The following day, I called, only to be told the order was delayed. The agent assured me it would arrive by 6 p.m. It didn’t. On Friday, I called again, hoping for information, but was told the order was still in transit and delayed. After two calls, I knew no more than the company’s app had told me on Wednesday, when it reported the delay and instructed me to call for details.
The blinds arrived at 6 a.m. Saturday, 58 hours late. On Sunday afternoon, 34 hours later, I received an email urging me to collect my order as soon as possible because the store had limited storage space.
Three days late fulfilling its commitment, yet less than a day and a half later, Home Depot treated my order as an ordinary pickup awaiting a customer who hadn’t acted promptly. Not a great customer experience, and perhaps an isolated one, but my years in finance and operations have taught me that some of the most valuable information lies in the exceptions.
So consider this simple change to improve the customer experience: retain automated pickup reminders for orders delivered on time, but require human review when an order misses its promised delivery date.
A late order is no longer treated as an ordinary transaction. Its history informs what happens next, rather than simply triggering the next step in the process.
That addresses the immediate customer experience, but the benefits don’t stop there.
Exceptions become visible and measurable. Management can identify how frequently delivery commitments are missed, by which suppliers, distribution centers, stores, or product categories, and by how much.
Manual intervention creates a measurable operating expense. The additional labor can be quantified, assigned to delivery failures, and incorporated into operating forecasts rather than disappearing into general store payroll.
The organization can connect those costs directly to supply-chain performance, making the financial consequences of missed delivery commitments visible to the functions responsible for them.
Finally, the organization gains a mechanism for identifying and addressing the causes of those costs. Instead of asking a store manager to reduce overtime, management can ask why the exceptions exist and whether correcting an upstream failure would eliminate the expense altogether.
One small process change improves the customer experience, creates operational visibility, strengthens financial forecasting, and connects costs to their underlying causes.
No new transformation program required. Just a better question about how the existing process should work.